The Atlantic Sound - Tapa blanda

"Like Jonathan Raban and the early V. S. Naipaul, Phillips can do truly live reportage. The honesty and detail forces you to experience what the writer is going through . . . Whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction, he seems to hone every thought and word before he allows it to leave his head. That stillness beneath his words is what makes Caryl Phillips such an exceptional writer and this book so compelling" (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Observer)

"So compelling and so original...The result is history and sociology at its most heartfelt" (Booklist)

"A powerful re-examination of the salve-trade and its terrible legacy" (Observer)

"A glowing, indicting, dignified and dissenting work... The Atlantic Sound is crucial, unputdownable" (Scotsman)

"'A splendidly honest and vividly detailed venture into some of history's darkest corners-by a novelist who is also a superb reporter'" (Kirkus Reviews)

In The Atlantic Sound Caryl Phillips explores the complex notion of what constitutes 'home'. Seen through the historical prism of the Atlantic Slave trade, he undertakes a personal quest to come to terms with the dislocation and discontinuities that a diasporan history engenders in the soul of an individual.

Philips journeys from the Caribbean to Britain by banana boat, repeating a journey he made to England as a child in the 1950s. He then visits three pivotal cities: Liverpool, developed on the back of the slave trade, Elmina, on the west coast of Ghana, site of the most important slave fort in Africa; and Charleston in the American South, celebrated as the city where the Civil War began - not for being the city where fully one-third of African-Americans were landed and sold into bondage.

Finally, Phillips journeys to Israel where he encounters a community of two thousand African-Americans, whose thirty-year sojourn in the Negev desert leaves him once again contemplating the modern condition of diasporan displacement.